Virtual reality (VR) technologies have been conventionally applied to fields such as entertainment (e,g., gaming), education, and social activities. Further, potential of VR has been recognized with respect to training and rehabilitation for people with disabilities, such as those with dyslexia, people who have experienced a stroke, people with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), etc.
While VR applications have great potential in a variety of use cases, conventional VR applications rely upon realistic visual feedback to provide an immersive experience to sighted people, for whom the visual sense is dominant. These existing VR applications, however, are generally not accessible to people with visual impairments, thereby preventing such people from benefiting from VR technologies.
Prior work in VR that has been developed for use by people with visual impairments has focused on creating auditory VR—for instance, an audio-based environment simulator game has been developed that facilitate allowing blind users to interact with a virtual scene through auditory feedback. In such game, presence of objects is identified through sound rendering. For example, a conventional VR system employs an acoustic VR space, where a portable system generates spatial audio to create the illusion that objects in the virtual scene are covered with speakers emitting sounds depending on their physical characteristics (e.g., color, texture, etc.). In another exemplary conventional VR system, real-world navigation strategies of people with visual impairments are incorporated into a virtual space, where echolocation (use of sound reflecting off objects to localize them) is simulated in the virtual space to assist users in better understanding the virtual space.
Other conventional VR systems have introduced haptic sensations to provide benefits of VR to people with visual impairments. Haptic sensation by way of white canes is the main channel for people with visual impairments to understand a physical space, with audio serving as a channel for complementary information. When navigating the real-world, the white cane is commonly used for low resolution scanning of the environment and to detect obstacles and identify distances. Similarly, legs and feet are used to feel the ground surface, and the palm or fingers are used to precisely recognize the shape and texture of objects. In an exemplary conventional VR system, a joystick is employed by a user, where movement of the joystick corresponds to movement in a virtual space, and further where the joystick is vibrated to present cues to a user as to boundaries of the virtual space and virtual objects in the virtual space. This system, however, is unable to allow for natural movement of a user as the user navigates through the virtual space.
In yet another exemplary conventional VR system, a haptic glove is worn by a user and generates force feedback to fingers of the user as the user moves through a virtual space, thereby providing the illusion that the user is navigating the virtual space with a cane. The user can hold a real cane, the grasp posture of the user can be detected, and force feedback can be provided through the haptic glove (to simulate vibrations that would be felt based upon the tip of the cane impacting a virtual object in the virtual space). This real cane, however, penetrates virtual objects in the virtual space, thereby failing to provide a user with realistic proprioceptive feedback as the user employs the cane to navigate the virtual space.